Efforts have been made to provide improved designs of bow-hunting arrows capable of producing more certain and quicker big game kills. Primarily, such efforts have been directed to the provision of various types of barbs which function to retain the arrow in the target so as to produce continuous bleeding and thereby shorten the length of tracking and kill time.
Fixed barbs, while effective for arrow retention, limit the depth of the wound. It has been suggested that various forms of retractable barbs may be useful in overcoming this particular problem. For example, arrow attachments have been devised which utilize spring-biased barbs initially held in a retracted position against the spring bias and adapted to be released upon impact with the big game target. Such devices are often of rather complex and expensive design, particularly with respect to the barb retention means responsible for holding the barbs in the inoperative position until impact.
Additionally, considerable attention has been given to the problem of withdrawing a barbed arrow without inducing unnecessary damage to surrounding meat areas. Thus, some designs include adjustable shaft mechanisms which may be worked externally of the game to retract the barbs exposed within the impacted areas. With such mechanisms the cost of manufacture and the resulting cost of the product may increase substantially.
In most cases, blood loss, rather than shock, is the primary cause of death of a game animal shot with an arrow. While barbs are intended to promote continuous bleeding, they cannot be relied upon to increase bleeding. It is recognized that in order to produce fast and clean kills from well-placed shots, substantial hemorrhaging is desirable. Thus, in the absence of any reliable means for increasing hemorrhaging, ill-placed shots are even more undesirable as they are more apt to result in painful injury to game animals and, in many instances, be the cause of either a painful recovery or unduly slow death.
The use of barbs of the type described is incapable of reliably overcoming the two strongest arguments against big game hunting, namely, painful protracted injury or painful slow death.